Single Shot MultiBox Detector for Urban Plantation Single Tree Detection and Location With High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery

Using high-resolution remote sensing images to automatically identify individual trees is of great significance to forestry ecological environment monitoring. Urban plantation has realistic demands for single tree management such as catkin pollution, maintenance of famous trees, landscape construction, and park management. At present, there are problems of missed detection and error detection in dense plantations and complex background plantations. This paper proposes a single tree detection method based on single shot multibox detector (SSD). Optimal SSD is obtained by adjusting feature layers, optimizing the aspect ratio of a preset box, reducing parameters and so on. The optimal SSD is applied to single tree detection and location in campuses, orchards, and economic plantations. The average accuracy based on SSD is 96.0, 92.9, and 97.6% in campus green trees, lychee plantations, and palm plantations, respectively. It is 11.3 and 37.5% higher than the latest template matching method and chan-vese (CV) model method, and is 43.1 and 54.2% higher than the traditional watershed method and local maximum method. Experimental results show that SSD has a strong potential and application advantage. This research has reference significance for the application of an object detection framework based on deep learning in agriculture and forestry.